Is Apple’s Siri a failure?

When Apple unveiled the newest version of the iPad that it will begin selling on Friday, CEO Tim Cook spent the early part of his presentation recounting some of the company’s big successes of the last year. One of them was Siri, the so-called “personal assistant” that’s available only on the iPhone 4S, and is the primary subject of that device’s advertising campaign.

In the omnipresent TV commercials, Siri responds flawlessly to every command, making the iPhone owner’s life much easier.

Of course, real Siri users know this is hyperbole. As my brother-in-Hearst at the San Francisco Chronicle, Casey Newton, put it on Twitter when Cook called Siri “your best friend”:

“Siri is your best friend,” Tim Cook says. Not true — my best friend understands me more than 70 percent of the time.

A New York man represented by Robbins Geller is suing Apple for false advertising, alleging that the company’s commercials convey a “misleading and deceptive message” about Siri’s capabilities.

Frank M. Fazio, who bought his 4S in Brooklyn in November, is part of purported class of people who feel suckered. According to the lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in California:

[I]n many of Apple’s television advertisements, individuals are shown using Siri to make appointments, find restaurants, and even learn the guitar chords to classic rock songs or how to tie a tie. In the commercials, all of these tasks are done with ease with the assistance of the iPhone 4S’s Siri feature, a represented functionality contrary to the actual operating results and performance of Siri.

This is filed as a class-action suit, and anyone can file a lawsuit complaining about anything. But clearly there’s some frustration among many iPhone 4S users regarding Siri. Whenever I meet someone who’s got a 4S, I make a point of asking that person about Siri. About 60 percent say it’s not useful enough to use regularly, and of the many times I’ve tried using Siri on friends’ devices, it has failed me at least 50 percent of the time.

No, that’s hardly a scientific survey, and yes, there are plenty of people who think Siri isjust aces. But there is enough grousing about it not being able to understand its users, giving wrong or even bizarre answers and being unable to connect to the Internet that the feature is clearly stumbling.

Granted, Siri is billed on Apple’s website as a beta product (though you wouldn’t know that from its TV advertisements). But so far, I’d suggest that Siri is a failed beta. Perhaps the best evidence comes from two fronts, and one of them is Apple itself.

Then there’s Siri, Apple’s new voice-recognition software. Woz says he’s been using Siri for a long time and used to love it when it was an independent application created for the iPhone.

But ever since Apple bought Siri and built the software into the iPhone 4S, it doesn’t work as well as it used to.

“I used to ask Siri, ‘What are the five biggest lakes in California?’ and it would come back with the answer. Now it just misses. It gives me real estate listings. I used to ask, ‘What are the prime numbers greater than 87?’ and it would answer. Now instead of getting prime numbers, I get listings for prime rib, or prime real estate,” Woz says.

Worse, a lot of the time Siri says it can’t make a connection to the back-end servers that power the system. “With the iPhone 4 I could press a button and call my wife. Now on the 4S I can only do that when Siri can connect over the Internet. But many times it can’t connect. I’ve never had Android come back and say, ‘I can’t connect over the Internet.’”

Then, during Apple’s iPad unveiling, Cook may have touted Siri but the feature was not included on the new iPad – a device that clearly has the power to be up to the task.

John Brownlee of the Cult of Mac has two theories. The first is that, because Apple sells a version of the iPad that’s Wi-Fi-only – and thus isn’t guaranteed to have an Internet connection at all times – Siri would be even more unsatisfying on those devices.

But other is more basic, Brownlee says – Siri “is broken”. Brownlee cites Wozniak’s comments, and tells his own tale of frustration:

It’s true. There were all sorts of questions I could ask Siri when it first launched. For example, I used to be able to ask Siri what the average height of an American male was, and get a correct answer. Now, it tells me the highest mountain, and the male population. I’m no expert, but if Siri could intelligently and correctly answer a question five months ago, and now it can’t, Siri’s gone from beta status to alpha.

The fact that Siri is so much dumber now than it was at launch points to Apple having problems ramping it up to the extreme demand of the iPhone 4S. I don’t know for certain, but my guess is that so many people are hammering on Siri right now that Apple has to devote far less time and processing power to calculating Siri’s answers, returning measurably less intelligent answers than just a few months ago. It’s like notching down the playing power of a chess computer: Siri is spending less time each turn “thinking” about its next “move.”

If Siri’s this dumb just trying to keep up with the iPhone 4S demand, imagine what would happen to the service with the crushing weight of 60 million new iPads heaped down on top of it to boot. It would be crushed like a sparrow suddenly teleported to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Brownlee is speculating, of course, but the common experience among 4S users of Siri’s servers often being unreachable lends credence to his theory.

Users of the original Siri app, which Apple killed off when the 4S launched, remember how good it was, and that enthusiasm for it helped drive expectations when it was built into the new iPhone. But in its current form, it’s beginning to look like Siri isn’t scaling well.

As I wrote back in December, if Apple has bigger plans for its personal assistant – such as using it to help navigate its long-rumored HDTV – the company is going to have to whip Siri into shape quickly. Right now, it’s anything but magical.